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Zoltan: 
Data-Management Services for Parallel Applications


The Zoltan Team
Sandia National Laboratories:
Erik Boman
Karen Devine
Lee Ann Fisk
Robert Heaphy
Bruce Hendrickson
Vitus Leung
Courtenay Vaughan

Ohio State University
Umit Catalyurek
Doruk Bozdag

National Institute of Standards and Technology
William F. Mitchell


Now available: Zoltan 2.1
Note: Zoltan 2.1 contains a significant bugfix in Zoltan's hypergraph partitioner. We strongly recommend you upgrade to Zoltan 2.1. We apologize for the inconvenience.

New Features in Zoltan 2:

Parallel Hypergraph Partitioning
Distance-1 and Distance-2 graph coloring
Multicriteria Geometric Partitioning
C++ Interface
See the release notes for descriptions of new functionality and more.
Release Notes
Backward Compatibility
Download Now!

The Zoltan Library provides critical data-management services to a wide range of parallel applications.  Zoltan includes many utilities needed by unstructured and/or adaptive parallel applications. These utilities include Zoltan's object-oriented interface is easy-to-use and enables Zoltan to be used by a number of different applications.  Zoltan is designed to be flexible and extensible, so different algorithms can be used, compared and added easily.

Why Zoltan is needed:

  • In some applications, work loads and/or geometric locality change as computations proceed;
    Zoltan provides dynamic redistribution of data to maintain high performance. 
    • Adaptive finite element methods
    • Particle methods
    • Contact detection algorithms
    • Multiphysics simulations
    • Adaptive physics models
  • Processors need to track off-processor data's locations in dynamic environments; Zoltan's distributed data directories allow applications to efficiently query and update off-processor data locations.
  • Unstructured and adaptive applications require complicated interprocessor communication; Zoltan's unstructured communication package manages sends and receives for application developers.
  • State-of-the-art parallel computers often do not have sophisticated debugging tools available; Zoltan's dynamic memory management package simplifies location of memory leaks and other memory errors.
Advantages of using Zoltan in applications: Advantages of using Zoltan for developing new algorithms: Zoltan philosophy and project description: Documentation: Related links: For more information, contact: